remember the "diameter of the internet"?

Tue Jun 18 19:09:46 UTC 2002

--On Tuesday, June 18, 2002 11:52 AM -0700 Vadim Antonov 
<avg at exigengroup.com> wrote:
>
> Er... back then it took 2 months to learn everything a backbone engineer
> had to know.  Nowadays it's an alphabet soup of stupid techniques to
> achieve the same result - i.e. to deliver a packet from place A to place
> B.  Blame greeeeedy vendors (OFRV, particularly, and don't forget
> hellcore) who sell FUD instead of making their products easy to use.
> Given their dominant position on the market, everyone else has to be
> "compatible" with the zillion little features just to stay afloat.

that's an interesting point of view.  i would say that really nothing at 
all has changed in 10 years.  sure, there is a bag-of-stupid-ip-tricks to 
choose from that didn't exist back then but none of the tricks have solved 
our problems.  the political/financial issues crept in, and the 
bag-of-stupid-ip-tricks seems to have developed as a way to solve those 
issues, which they have not solved.

the same level of fundamental knowledge required back then applies today, 
and many network and systems engineers are *still* lacking that knowledge. 
i suppose your are right if you're implying that the 
bag-of-stupid-ip-tricks has obfuscated what's really important.

uucp and modems are looking pretty attractive to me again.

> Regarding the diameter of the Internet - I'm still trying to figure out
> why the hell anyone would want to have "edge" routers (instead of dumb
> TDMs) if not for inability of IOS to support large numbers of virtual
> interfaces.  Same story goes for "clusters" of backbone routers.

everyone note:  vadim threw that can of worms, it wasn't me!

-b